To Be Heard and to Be Seen
by InvisibleGeek
Summary: Three Shot. A gentle girl, who turns away at the violent parts of movies, has kept a secret her entire life. No one would guess, she couldn't hurt anyone. / A quiet boy, whose entire life was destroyed because of his knowledge. No one would guess, no could hurt him.
1. Birth

**Part one: _we were born this way, different, in a world that wasn't ready for us. It wasn't noticeable at first, but as we grew older, the stronger it became. With strength, comes isolation._**

In Chicago, a small boy covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. He didn't want to hear it, their anger. The constant attack on his senses. He wished they'd be quiet, he didn't want them to fight.

Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he buried his small face into his blankets, praying to god for their screaming to cease.

Across the home, his parents read. They sat in silence, letting their two toddlers sleep without disturbance despite their irritation with one another.

In Maryland, a small girl was awake in her crib. She sucked on her blanket, watching the mobile twist above. She reached above for the stars, and then stood, grabbing one. Her fat, baby hand tugged lightly on the star, and the entire mobile fell from the ceiling, where it had been bolted in.

She screamed and cried, her parents entered and fretted over her, believing the thing to have fallen by way of faulty assemblage.

* * *

Jazmine watched her father struggle to carry the book case from the moving van. He pulled at it, leaned it, and tugged the resultant wood upwards in an attempt to lift it. After a few tries he was sweating and panting, having only moved the furniture a few inches.

The young girl, merely nine years old, furrowed her brows in confusion. She was unable to understand where the trouble lay. She could move it no problem, that she knew, and she was just a child.

To help, however, would confuse her parents. They were hard workers, and never paid much attention to her. She was never put in sports and in school only boys were picked for physical activities. She learned that being strong was wrong, it was bad.

She was defective.

Across the street, a young boy blasted music through his earbuds, drowning out the voices of the silent suburbs. Listening to those voices, he knew, only led to misery. Responding to them, led to worse.

His family considered him a recluse, a strange child who, because of his parents deaths - double suicide - was distrusting of others. In a way, they were correct, but they wouldn't ever have the whole story.

How Huey when old enough to speak revealed all of his parents opinions and secrets to one another, how without meaning to in his innocent recital of their thoughts led them both to give up on life together. To abandon them. It was his fault Riley and him were alone. And he'd never tell.

The walls that blocked the others from hearing every thought weren't present for him, and his ears must've been made wrong.

He was defective.


	2. Isolation is Self-Preservation

_**Part two: there are no others like us, we were alone.**_

The boys eyes were what scared the public the most. They pierced humorlessly through you, they saw right down into your soul and past that. They were never impressed, always worn and bitter.

He was too young to have a gaze like that, too innocent. His brother, by contrast, was lively and cheerful. A little on the troubled side, but he made fast friends with everyone and was bound for success after his troublesome high school years. He had a vibrancy for life that the older brother lacked, a joy.

How could one be so well liked, and the other dead and deprived, picked apart over the years but invisible vultures?

And the girl, who shared with him the isolation, but not the emptiness.

She was shy, she hid beneath frills and soft, feminine timidity. She was fragile and never participated with her classmates, hardly spoke or drew attention to herself. If someone tried to touch her, she panicked, retreating into herself.

She didn't trust them, not one. She needed to keep her secret to herself.

He didn't trust them, not one. He needed to keep their secrets out of his head.

So where she spoke softly and pretended to be weak and undesired, he filled his ears with media of all kinds, the thoughts didn't translate over recordings. His ear buds were always in and he ignored everyone, trying to fade from the scene.

If someone interrupted his constant stimulation, took away his escape, his temper couldn't be sedated. He didn't need to pretend to be undesired, he was a ticking time bomb.


	3. Connection in Winter

**Part Three: _and then, he found me._**

The sunlight glittered across the water, slight ripples rising across the lake beneath the gentle fingers of a breeze. Jazmine Dubois sat at the end of a dock, bare feet lazily dipping into the frigid water. She wore a knitted sweater and jeans, little protection from the quickly dropping temperatures. Her breath fogged the air before her, and still, she continued to expose her toes to the icy lake water, opting to feel something in the chilly air rather than the hollowness the warmth of her apartment provided.

She had nothing, no one. She worked as many hours as possible to pay rent, something that would've been easier if she had a roommate. She blamed work and school on why she never visited her parents, and she had yet to tell them where she lived.

Isolation, she knew, was the only option left to her. She retracted her toes from the water, letting the painful liquid drip from her painted nails and back to it's home. Her thin arms, lacking both muscle and fat, wrapped around her shoulders. She sought comfort in the only thing remaining; herself.

Her wild locks danced about her head in the breeze, shielding her red tipped ears.

Footsteps on the wooden stretch behind her, planks creaking in rhythm to the movement of the oncommer. Jazmine tensed, unsure, and turned to meet the stare of the stranger.

"It's you."

* * *

" _I'm all I need._ _"_ A quiet whisper, a voice like a bell that drifted frigidly across his form in the silence. The park was almost always empty in the winter, it was why he loved it so. It was a break from the sound, from the fucking ceaseless thoughts of the _others._

Instead of reaching for his ear buds, be followed the sound of the voice. He was drawn to the unspoken pain, the isolation he could hear in his own thoughts.

She was sitting on the dock, shoes off and in her lap. Honestly, she thought quietly, not the pounding, uncontrolled volumes of everyoneelse, but a soft, hidden volume. It was like she wanted to slip away, like she was scared of herself.

He let her thoughts roam, filling the empty air around them. When she considered letting herself slip in and drown for the fourth time, he made his presence known.

"It's you." She had said.

He nodded, and she stood, sighing.

" _I just wanted a moment to myself."_ She thought. And he, silently, always silently, agreed with the sentiment.

He walked forwards down the dock, as she walked past, trading places. He hadn't wanted her to leave, to disturb her, but perhaps it was for the best. They had grown up in the same town, lived on the same street for their public school years, but they hadn't ever interacted. The dock was slick and he slipped, eyes wide with surprise as he fell. And the girl was there, her arm grasping his and holding him freely above the ice. With ease she set him down back on the dock, and he was bombarded by a torrent of her inner thoughts.

Fear was the most prominent. "I'm sorry." They both said, voices joined in synchronization.

She took a step to leave and he spoke, talking more than perhaps he ever had during his first twenty years on this earth. "Wait!"

Her green eyes shone, but she turned back to him.

His words left him in a rush, trying to compete with her thoughts, with her silent panic. "Don't be scared, please. You're right, I do know, but now you know. I can hear everything, spoken and unspoken, in everyone. From everyone. We're the same, you and I."

Her doubt, strong and bold pummeled down on him like punches. "Listen to me!" He begged, grasping her hands with his despite her violent thoughts of crushing him, unintentionally or not.

He did what he never thought he would, what he had always ran from and what she too, had always denied herself - he opened himself up, face wet and limbs shaking.

"I trust you. I trust you. We're the same and I trust you."

Her tears fell, and so did his.


End file.
